The New Nation - Internet Edition

African NGOs call for moratorium on biofuels

Rainer Chr. Hennig

African NGOs call for moratorium on biofuels African Future, 20 February - Uproar is slowly spreading among African civil society organisations and scientists, fearing that the biofuel revolution will bring more food insecurity, higher food prices and hunger to the continent. A petition calling for a "moratorium on new agrofuel developments in Africa" has so far been signed by over 30 NGOs all over the continent.

Biofuels have already revolutionised agriculture in the US, Brazil and parts of Asia, and if EU energy commitments are lived up to, soon will do so in Europe. Now, foreign investors are queuing at African government offices to realise giant biofuel projects on this fertile continent, promising a new "green revolution", greater independence from the oil market and even fuel export possibilities. And they are successful. So successful that the petitioners fear a quick negative impact on African food security, which is already endangered by rising world market prices for basic foods. "Investors are rushing to privatise our land for their plantations, while our governments willingly allocate millions of hectares from the 70% of Africa’s land that is still communally owned," the petition warns.

"Jatropha" is being pushed as one of the new miracle crops for African small farmers to produce fuel, and the impact is already being felt around the continent. In Tanzania, thousands of farmers growing rice and maize are already being evicted from fertile areas of land with good access to water, for biofuel sugar cane and jatropha plantations on newly privatised land. Villages are being cleared, but families have been given minimal compensation or opportunities for their loss of land, community and way of life, according to the petitioners.

Millions of hectares in Ethiopia have been identified as suitable for biofuel production, and many foreign companies have already been allocated land from farmland, forests and wilderness areas. Even protected areas are not safe from the spread of biofuels. One European investor has been granted 13,000 hectares of land in Oromia state; 87% of which is the Babile Elephant Sanctuary, a home to rare and endangered elephants. In Zambia, jatropha cultivation is booming without privatisation. Foreign investors are using contracts with a large number out-growers that last up to 30 years. The petitioners fear that the out-growers have been tricked: "These contracts serve to transfer control over production from the farmer to the company, through a system of loans, numerous extra charges and service payments, and prices determined by the company. Under such a system of dependence, farmers are likely to increase their indebtedness to the company, until they may be obliged to hand over their land altogether."

In West Africa, jatropha is already being grown in Togo, Ghana, Senegal, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire and Niger. Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade has placed fuel crops at the heart of an agriculture renewal programme in his country. In Ghana one company is planning to plant one million hectares of jatropha with support of the government, while in Benin another company has obtained permission to plant a quarter of a million hectares of biofuel crops. Farmers in Benin and in many other countries in the region have, on the average, no more than 1 hectare to grow there products and the biofuels are expected to make a serious dent into their food production.

The petitioners therefore hold that the biofuel revolution is "geared to replace millions of hectares of local agricultural systems, and the rural communities working in them, with large plantations. It is oriented to substitute biodiversity-based indigenous cropping, grazing and pasture farming systems by monocultures and genetically engineered agrofuel crops."

In agreement with several new scientific analyses, they hold that "the current push for agrofuels exacerbate, rather than solve, the problem of climate change." "Among Africa’s many challenges, food security is one of the most serious. A full car tank of ethanol uses the same amount of grain that can feed a child for a year. We do not understand how our governments can willingly take our food, land and water to meet the fuel luxuries of the wealthy in the North, when we already face problems of food security and environmental destruction at home," the petition reads.

The call for a moratorium on new biofuel developments in Africa is in line with warnings from the main UN agencies involved in agriculture and food aid, WFP and FAO, registering that the increased acreage used for biofuels is already contributing to higher food prices and may lead to more hunger in the world. Indeed, already in October last year, the UN's Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, in his annual report called for a world-wide 5-year moratorium on building biofuel manufacturing plants that use food stocks.

(Source: Souparna Lahiri, Waterwatch)

Bird flu in West Bengal

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee

I was trying to think what I would do if I were a chicken-owner and it looked like the flu had arrived in the village. I would worry, of course, about money: how would we make ends meet? If I had an unfriendly neighbour, I would start to worry that he was going to blame us if his chicken were to die. If I were given to looking for someone to blame, I would start to wonder if, somehow, it had to do with the fact that some people keep their chicken in a horrible mess. If I were given to being messy, I might be worrying that someone else might be thinking the same about me. But most of all, I would worry about the fact that somewhere, some time probably not too far in the future, the virus will mutate into something that could kill me and my near and dear ones. And, of course, if this was really me, I would be panicking.

The one thing that would not have occurred to me is to try to spend more time with my chicken. But by all accounts this is what people are doing in West Bengal: hiding them inside homes, driving them across the state border to sell, turning back the people sent to cull them. As a result, the epidemic has turned into a threat to poultry owners the state over and possibly beyond, and we seem to be flirting with what might be the first great public health crisis of this millennium.

The problem, in part, is that the people do not believe what the government says. They do not believe that the risks are as grave as the government makes them out to be and they do not believe they will get compensated. This is why a few health officials got manhandled when they tried to cull the chicken and others got turned back.

This is why the chief minister of West Bengal had to announce that compensation would be paid on the spot. This is why he has been asking his party members to help with the culling.

A part of the problem is also that people do not entirely believe that the government will keep its word. Will the local CPI(M) leaders be made to part with their chicken? Or would they be given a special dispensation, as they so often have been? Would the government be willing to delay culling till it was clear that the chicken in a hamlet were actually sick? What if there were a lot of protests: would the government back down? Or raise compensation levels?

It all goes back to credibility. The right to define and represent public interest in situations such as the current bird flu episode, situations where being decisive is critical (because, for example, the bird flu virus allows no time for public debate and political negotiations), without freshly seeking the mandate of the people, is at the core of what constitutes the authority of any state. In the eyes of many people in West Bengal, the state no longer has an automatic claim to that authority: After thirty years of Left Front rule-thirty years of half-truths and outright lies, thirty years of strategic compromises and elastic principles, thirty years of playing favourites and looking the other way- and thirty years of an opposition that has never let truth or the common good stand in the way of attacking the government- the average person treats any declaration of government policy, mostly correctly, not as a necessary, decisive move, but as the opening gambit in a long political game.

This erosion of authority was also central to the recent tragic events in Singur and, much more dramatically, in Nandigram. It's true that in both there was ample cause to disagree with the government's stance ("Who needs more cars?" "Who wants an SEZ?"). But the final decision on large-scale land use has always and everywhere been the state's domain, for the good and obvious reason that if the decision were to be left to the market, a few people who refuse to sell would be able to hold all willing sellers to ransom. Moreover, whatever people might say about the West Bengal government's policies today, it was elected (with a huge majority) on an explicit mandate of bringing industry to the state. Yet, curiously, the opposition in both places, was based on the essential illegitimacy of what the government was doing and had little to do with the specific causes that the government had decided to promote (cars, SEZs) or the way the compensation was paid (in cash, making it more likely that it would be spent on TVs and alcohol). And remarkably, the West Bengal government did not do much to defend itself, despite the fact that by the dismal standards of Indian state governments it had actually made a reasonable effort to compensate the losers (as the Kolkata High Court recently concluded).

What the chief minister offered in those early days was bluster ("we will go ahead") rather than reasoned argument ("this is what the state does all over the country- indeed everywhere in the world-and we are trying to do it better") or strategic appeals to self-interest ("how can we let the intransigence of a selfish few hold up the future of your children?"). I suspect one reason he went that way was that he had already internalised this loss of credibility. He assumed, perhaps rightly, that many of the ordinary people who had thrown in their lot with the opposition had long stopped listening-bewildered, caught between a government that always insists that it is right and an opposition that never hesitates to assert the opposite.

In some ways what happened in Nandigram was a direct consequence of this loss in authority. The local goons of the CPI(M), sensing that the debate was not going anywhere, decided to pre-empt: guns were to do what words could not. The opposition responded in kind; the CPI(M) lay low for a few months and then came back with bigger guns; and so it goes on, because no one seems to believe that the matter can be settled under the agency of the state.

After all this is a state where the chief minister could defend murderous brutality by his party members "as a party leader and not as the chief minister of West Bengal".

It is also probably no accident that just a week after this unfortunate admission by the Chief Minister, the Taslima Nasreen affair exploded. We do not like what she writes, the protestors said, we want her to go-are you for her or for us? The government, notably, did not, could not, say that we are for no one; we are for order and for hospitality, for the rule of law and the freedom of expression. Instead it tied itself into a thousand embarrassing knots.

Perhaps the one good thing that could come out of the lives of so many dead chicken is a reminder to all sides in West Bengal-perhaps elsewhere in India as well- of what might be the first lesson of democratic theory: That winning an election does guarantee being able to govern, and nor does losing absolve one all responsibility towards making governance possible.

Victory transfers to the winning party the presumption of authority, of being able to act on its judgment, but its ability to actually do so depends on the credibility it carries with it-especially among those who did not vote for it-and the willingness of the opposition to let it govern. And the problem is that as Indian politics becomes more and more competitive, all sides have to focus more on winning the next election, and this makes it harder and harder for the parties to rise above their partisan commitments and to acknowledge the authority of the state.

In the meanwhile in West Bengal, the chicken, as the expression goes, are coming home to roost-or more exactly, to die.

(CSE/Down To Earth Feature Service)

Studying rivers for clues to global carbon cycle

Tarequl Islam Munna

In the science world, in the media, and recently, in our daily lives, the debate continues over how carbon in the atmosphere is affecting global climate change. Studying just how carbon cycles throughout the Earth is an enormous challenge, but one Northwestern University professor is doing his part by studying one important segment-rivers.

Aaron Packman, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, is collaborating with ecologists and microbiologists from around the world to study how organic carbon is processed in rivers.

Packman, who specializes in studying how particles and sediment move around in rivers, is co-author of a paper on the topic published online in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The paper evaluates our current understanding of carbon dynamics in rivers and reaches two important conclusions: it argues that carbon processing in rivers is a bigger component of global carbon cycling than people previously thought, and it lays out a framework for how scientists should go about assessing those processes.

Much more is known about carbon cycling in the atmosphere and oceans than in rivers. Evaluating large-scale material cycling in a river provides a challenge-everything is constantly moving, and a lot of it moves in floods. As a result, much of what we know about carbon processing in rivers is based on what flows into the ocean.

"But that's not really enough," Packman said. "You miss all this internal cycling."

In order to understand how carbon cycles around the globe-through the land, freshwater, oceans and atmosphere-scientists need to understand how it moves around, how it's produced, how it's retained in different places and how long it stays there.

In rivers, carbon is both transformed and consumed. Microorganisms like algae take carbon out of the atmosphere and incorporate it into their own cells, while bacteria eat dead organic matter and then release CO2 back into the atmosphere.

"It's been known for a long time that global carbon models don't really account for all the carbon," Packman said. "There's a loss of carbon, and one place that could be occurring is in river systems." Even though river waters contain a small fraction of the total water on earth, they are such dynamic environments because microorganisms consume and transform carbon at rapid rates.

"We're evaluating how the structure and transport conditions and the dynamics of rivers create a greater opportunity for microbial processing," Packman said.

Packman is the first to admit that studying microorganisms, carbon and rivers sounds more like ecology than engineering. But such problems require work from all different areas, he said.

"We're dealing with such interdisciplinary problems, tough problems, so we have to put fluid mechanics, transport, ecology and microbiology together to find this overall cycling of carbon," he said. "People might say it's a natural science paper, but to me it's a modern engineering paper. To understand what's going on with these large-scale processes, we have to analyze them quantitatively, and the tools for getting good estimates have been developed in engineering."

Packman was introduced to the co-authors of the paper-ecologists who study how dead leaves and soil drive stream ecology and who come from as far away as Spain and Austria-about 10 years ago through the activity of the Stroud Water Research Center in Pennsylvania.

Since then, they have collaborated on many similar projects around river structure and transport dynamics. They are currently working on a project funded by the National Science Foundation on the dynamics of organic carbon in rivers and trying to understand how carbon delivered from upstream areas influence the ecology of downstream locations.

"The broadest idea is really part of global change efforts to understand carbon cycling over the whole Earth, which is an enormous challenge," Packman said.

Beyond belief: Who will save the Ganga?

Akhilesh Singh & Binay Singh,TNN

While the Magh Mela at the Sangam in Allahabad attracted tens of thousands of pilgrims each day over the last month for their annual dips, as usual, the UP government can sigh with relief that there were no protests this time. During the Ardha Kumbh Mela in January last year when sadhus threatened to take 'jal samadhi' if the high pollution level in the river wasn't treated. Indeed, it was perhaps a result of the song and dance that the sanyasis made last year that led the administration to take some steps to reduce effluents into the Ganga. But are these enough? The state government has sealed 135 tanneries in Kanpur since December 2006.

But none of the government agencies are doing anything to stop the discharge of domestic sewage into the Ganga that, by some estimates, is responsible for nearly 75% of its pollution. The UP Pollution Control Board (UPPCB), the agency that's supposed to act against the causative factors of Ganga's pollution, most notably domestic sewage, is clueless.

The pilgrims, who will continue their dips in the river up to Mahashivratri in mid-March, will thus be doing so in a river whose fundamental problem of sludge hasn't been solved. So how bad is the Ganga Action Plan (GAP) story? Herewith some disturbing facts. Kanpur alone produces more than 400 million litres per day (mld) of wastewater, of which 300 mld is from domestic sewage. Industries, including tanneries, produce approximately 100 mld of effluents.

There are as many as 50 and 23 drains joining the Ganga in Allahabad and Kanpur. The three treatment plants in Kanpur manage to clear only about 160 mld of wastewater - more than 250 mld of untreated sludge continues to get discharged into the Ganga. The functional capacity of Allahabad-based treatment plant is a mere 60 mld, whereas the city produces about 300 mld of sewage, with very high percentage of it being domestic waste. "Holding more than 600 mld of water for more than two months is impossible, as there's no infrastructure to do so," says Kanpur-based environmentalist, Rakesh Jaiswal.

The sludge is supposed to be drained to out the city's outskirts to treatment plants but authorities say they haven't the support systems in place for it. UPPCB regional officer Radheshyam said the board acted against tanneries because it was responsible for the industrial waste being discharged into Ganga. The responsibility for treating domestic sewage lay with Kanpur Jal Nigam, which is being funded under GAP.

But the Jal Nigam's general manager D P Singh says stopping discharge of domestic wastewater is impossible because they haven't the capacity to store the sewage from homes. In a classic case of bureaucratic red-tape, funds allocated by the Centre to the state under GAP for infrastructure and capacity building of sewage storage plants, are diverted to operations and maintenance. This is because the state has no money to pay for its mandate, which is maintenance and operations of GAP-related infrastructure. Chairman of UP Leather Industries Association Mohd Ishaq says the leather industrialists have been made fall guys and the civil society, including the courts, are being misguided by the government agencies in the name of cleaning Ganga.

"Only 193 tanneries are functional and this will harm the leather industry," he says. Ishaq says that most of the tanneries were linked with the common effluent treatment plant (CETP) and a few tanneries had their own treatment plants. "We are being victimised and none is bothered either about domestic waste or the effluents produced by industries other than leather," he says.

President of the Ganga Pradushan Mukti Abhiyan, Swami Harichaitanya Maharaj, however, says the government should plan alternate measures like centralized treatment plant and utilize the treated water in irrigating the barren lands than dumping it in Ganga. There isn't really a dearth of solutions to save the Ganga. But there's a clear lack of political and administrative will.